Industrial facilities, which may include manufacturing facilities, refineries, chemical plants, or other similar types of facilities, utilize automated process control systems comprising numerous pieces of process instrumentation and control equipment, which facilitate automated control of various process equipment in the facility such as valves or pumps in order to produce a desired process performance. Examples of process instrumentation may include flow meters, temperature sensors, pressure transmitters, level sensors, and analysis instruments such as pH meters. Instrumentation generally operates at a defined setpoint within a specification range, though depending on the application, setpoints may be changed either outside of a given range or within the range based on optimization of operating conditions. Due to continued maintenance and optimization in a facility, operators controlling the process control system may change data values for setpoints in the process control system frequently.
Because the automated process control system is the facility operators' primary tool for control of the process, the control system itself always maintains the most current instrument specification data, which may include instrument setpoints, ranges, alarm settings, instrument name, description, dimensions, or other types of data relating to a process control instrument. Each instrument in a facility has an instrument specification sheet containing various data relating to the instrument. This data is typically maintained in an offline instrumentation specification database external to the process control system. When specification data is changed during the operation of a facility, which may occur on a large scale when a project is commissioned to upgrade the facility, which may include upgrades to the process control system, the instrumentation specification database is not typically updated in a timely manner to reflect the numerous changes in instrumentation data that occur. Often, the database is incompletely updated or not updated at all during major facility upgrades, or may be updated at a later time as a stand-alone project. Because even relatively small industrial facilities typically have a very large number of process control instruments, maintaining the offline instrumentation database may be a time-intensive and thus costly process. Because engineers and others in a facility generally rely on data contained in the instrumentation database, discrepancies in instrument specification data between the instrumentation database and the process control system can be problematic and require continuous double checking to ensure accurate specifications are being relied upon. These problems lead to inefficiencies in managing and operating a complex facility.
Accordingly, there is a need for an automated system and method for continuously maintaining accurate instrument specification data relating to instruments in a process control system in a database external to the control system.